Food

Pumpkin is one of those kinds of foods that automatically brings back memories of the holidays and harvest season. Any time I see a pumpkin, I remember crisp autumn days strolling through a pumpkin patch to find just the right one or the sight of a holiday table decorated with pumpkins and laden with pumpkin-flavored breads and pies.

During a time of year that gets increasingly cold and dark with every day that goes by, the sight of a pumpkin is a bright and colorful reminder of the bounty of the harvest and of the warmth and light of times we spend with family and friends during the holiday season.

Since no holiday table would be complete without at least one pumpkin-themed dish, I’ve put together a collection of some of my favorite real food, healthy pumpkin recipes that would be perfect for the holidays or for any day when you want the nostalgic flavor of pumpkin.

A lot of times, money can be a big issue for people wanting to switch to a healthier diet of organic, traditional, real food. Many people want to eat better quality food, but they don’t know if they can afford the extra cost.

There’s no doubt about it that organic food usually is more expensive than conventional food, sometimes a lot more expensive depending on where you live and where you shop. With a little bit of planing, though, there are ways to work around the extra cost and still be able to get good-quality real food while staying within your budget.

If you’re familiar with my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’m not anti-wheat or anti-grain. In fact, I think the majority of the recipes I’ve posted so far have included grains in some form or another.

What can I say? I love bread, and cake, and cookies 🙂 (Eaten in moderation and homemade from real, natural ingredients, of course!)

This isn’t a post about why I choose to eat wheat when other people are choosing to avoid it, though, so I’ll just summarize by saying that I think that properly-prepared grains can be part of a healthy diet for those who don’t have a sensitivity to gluten. I also don’t believe that there’s anything inherently wrong with wheat or other grains.

I do believe, though, that the way modern grains are processed and made into bread can have detrimental effects on our health.

So the question is, what exactly are the differences between modern bread and traditional bread? Here are four of the main differences between the two:

Of all of the things that have changed a lot in the past few years, our food supply is definitely one of them! And a lot of those changes have occurred in just the past century.

These foods may seem commonplace to us today, but in the scale of human history, these are all very recent, “newfangled” foods that the people of our great-grandparents generation viewed with a lot of skepticism at first.

Here’s a list of ten foods our ancestors never ate that didn’t even exist before the 20th century:

My first thought in writing this post was that it would probably be my most controversial post yet. And then I almost started laughing because I couldn’t believe that my most controversial post was one about flour!

As funny as it may seem, when you stop to think about it, the subject of flour can actually be a very controversial one among the natural health community. And that’s assuming that you even eat flour and grains to begin with (which would be a topic for a whole other post . . .)

I’ve been on both sides of the flour-eating spectrum. Growing up, all we ever had in our house was the average all-purpose white flour. That’s what my mom baked with, and that’s what I learned to bake with too. Whole wheat flour was for the “weird” people who did crazy things like buy organic food and use natural products.

It might seem like a bit of an oxymoron, considering Thanksgiving’s typical reputation as the holiday of gluttonous overeating, but, in my opinion, Thanksgiving actually has the potential to be the most health-promoting holiday of them all.

And why is it that Thanksgiving is the healthiest holiday? These are the four main reasons that came to my mind:

I love cranberry season, and each year I always look forward to finding fresh cranberries and stocking up on them so that I can keep on making cranberry-flavored foods throughout the year.

I’ve collected some of my favorite cranberry-themed recipes from my fellow bloggers and listed them all here. These holiday cranberry recipes are perfect for the holiday season, but they’re equally delicious all year-round in my opinion!